Susan interviewed her Wall Street 2 and The Greatest co-star Carey Mulligan for the April issue of Interview magazine. Read an excerpt of the interview below:

Carey Mulligan
By Susan Sarandon

Since her star-making performance in director Lone Scherfig’s An Education last fall, Carey Mulligan’s meteoric rise has itself become a cinematic affair—a quick-cutting whirlwind of awards shows, paparazzi, short hair, and self-effacing British charm. The 24-year-old Mulligan’s portrayal of a precocious but naïve schoolgirl whose hunger for experience leads her to become romantically involved with an older man (played brilliantly by Peter Sarsgaard) earned her an Oscar nomination. But Mulligan’s impressive work in An Education isn’t the only reason why many are finding great solace in her emergence as one of the most important young actresses working today. It’s what her success represents: the triumph of talent, acelebration of difference, and a small victory for a young woman who sounds believable when she says she’s in it for the roles and not the acclaim. “Carey stood out immediately,” Scherfig says. “Not because she reminded me of anyone—more perhaps because she didn’t.” “She has this great indefinable quality,” says Jim Sheridan, who directed Mulligan in his most recent film, Brothers. “Yet you feel like you immediately know who she is.” “In the British tradition, she holds a lot more in than an American actress,” offers Oliver Stone, who cast Mulligan as Winnie Gekko, the estranged daughter of Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gekko, in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, due out in September. “There’s a British reticence to Carey, a kind of apartness that, in my mind, characterizes Winnie Gekko, who has been alienated by life, family, the betrayal of her father, the death of her older brother, and the madness of her mother,” says Stone. “She wasn’t supposed to be typically American in her reactions to her environment. To the contrary—she was supposed to be rather terrified at the prospect of family.”

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